FanDuel, Yahoo Launch DFS Contests in Season-Long Wrappers

Following DraftKings’launch of a new daily/season-long hybrid game, rivals FanDuel and Yahoo! have introduced their own versions of DFS with a season-long flavor. FanDuel’s is called “Friends Mode” while Yahoo’s is the “Yahoo Cup.”

We’ll start with FanDuel’s Friends Mode, as it most closely mirror’s DraftKing’s Leagues. Really, it is just about the same thing, which isn’t surprising since the two largest DFS sites tend to do pretty much everything in lock-step. In fact, there is a good chance that FanDuel would have called it Leagues if DraftKings hadn’t done it first.

In Friends Mode, anyone can create a private league and then invite friends (whether or not those friends are already on FanDuel) to join, similar to how one would get a league together in season-long fantasy. The contests, though, are week-to-week (or day to day, if we’re not talking football, but who are we kidding – we are), just like in regular DFS and are setup by the commissioner of the league. For the most part, that’s it. Friends Mode is basically away for friends to get together and play against each other in fantasy sports without the pressure of remaining diligent about their teams for a full season.

The season-long hybrid part comes into play with a leader board for the league, giving players a chance to see how they are faring against their buddies in the long-term. The daily/weekly contests are where the money comes in; the season-long leader board looks to be just for bragging rights.

Yahoo’s DFS/season-long combo shares some traits with that of DraftKings and FanDuel, as contests run weekly during the NFL season and overall scores are added up across the enter season, but that is where the similarities stop. In the Yahoo Cup, everyone on the site who participates is competing against everyone else; there are no private leagues in this case.

Yahoo will be awarded $10,000 in prizes to the top points earners for Week 1 and presumably will be offering prizes for the remaining 15 weeks of the contest (it is only going through Week 16 of the NFL season). On top of that, the top 10,000 total points earners across all weeks will share $93,000 in prizes at the end of the Yahoo Cup with the winner earning $50,000.

It looks like in similarly-structured contests on Yahoo that consist of weekly contests adding up to longer competition only advance a certain number of players to subsequent rounds, but from the looks of it, everyone qualifies for every round of the Yahoo Cup. There is no requirement to participate in every week, though obviously a person’s chances of winning a season-end prize will be greatly diminished without submitting a lineup each and every week.